


The Adventure of the Berenstein Baby

by OhAine



Series: Simple Chemistry [6]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU, Berenstein Universe, Crack, Cultural inaccuracies, Drug use (the good kind), F/M, Gratuitous tea jokes, Head Canon Compliant, Humour, Mild Profanity, Post The Reichenbach Fall, Sherlolly - Freeform, Snark, Unplanned Birth, Unplanned Pregnancy, a tiny bit fluffy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-04
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-12-13 16:15:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11763630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OhAine/pseuds/OhAine
Summary: Anderson was right about The Kiss after all.2017 SAMFA winner (1st place) for Best Humour  (K-T rating).





	The Adventure of the Berenstein Baby

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mychakk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mychakk/gifts).



> Much love and thanks to satin_doll who beta'd this little piece of weirdness for me: thank you, m'dear for holding my hand and for egging me on - not to mention wrangling my commas ;)
> 
> Based on mychakk's prompt: Losing one thing is gaining another.
> 
> I own nothing but the mistakes.

oOo

 

In another life, in another universe, one where Sherlock Holmes had simply taken a swan dive from the roof of Bart’s Hospital and landed on a giant inflatable air bag, he would never, _never_ , have kissed his adorable pathologist goodbye.

As it was, he hadn’t, and he did.

One kiss (adrenaline, always at the end of a case, erections that required attention [the transport refusing his willing them away] and that base urge to rut, to fuck) he’d swung through that damn window like Errol Flynn (too many pirate movies in his youth) and kissed her like a swashbuckling hero of old.

 _Damn_ , _that kiss was good._

Maybe he’d denied himself for too long (amended: maybe he’d denied his attraction to Molly Hooper’s sweet little arse and gorgeous tits for too long) but, well, things being what they were, he’d bent her over an examination table and then-

Well, you don’t need to know the details, discretion being the better part of valour and all that.

Approximately five minutes later (first time, adrenaline – _scouts honour_ – he now lasts _way_ longer than that) he had divested himself of his virginity and was begging Molly to run away with him to dismantle Moriarty’s web.

Approximately ten minutes later they were in the back of a blacked out limousine on their way to a military air base, Molly’s legs wrapped around his head.

This had set the tone for the first month of their relationship and what Sherlock would eventually come to refer to as the ‘prelude to the incident.’

Said incident was a dignified afternoon tea at a Tibetan monastery, where the happy couple had sought refuge while pulling apart a drug trafficking network.

All would have been well, except the tea had been spiked.

***** sidebar *****

This did not come as a complete surprise to Sherlock. His gap year had been spent teaching English to the monks at this very monastery. He was then 1. British, and 2. a drug user. Were a Venn diagram to be drawn of his interests at that point in his life the intersection of those two things would have produced a sub set consisting entirely of hallucinogenic tea. So yes, he was somewhat aware of the risks. The fact that he chose not to alert Molly to them – while slightly morally dubious, he could admit – he would later come to justify as his own inept way of bringing to fruition the desires of his deepest heart without ever having to admit that he owned such a fragile organ.

***** end sidebar *****

So anyway, spiked tea.

For a few hours it was the 90’s all over again. Drugs, sex and Primal Scream – who extolled the virtues of getting loaded through the tinny speakers of his iPhone – all reigned supreme while Madchester was reborn (however briefly) in the Himalayas.

It would seem, however, that Sherlock Holmes had a knowledge gap when it came to Tibetan Tea ceremonies.

It was all well and good when at aged nineteen he’d flown high as a kite, solo. But – _apparently_ – when you did it with a lovely lady friend by your side and then, ahem, _consummated_ the happy event seven or eight times that evening alone, forcing the monks to flee to their cells (and use noise cancelling headphones lest their chastity be threatened by the very obviously bloody incredible sex being had by the couple they were hiding from the local crime lords) it meant that you had not only consented to marriage with the lovely lady in question, but were now joined in that holiest of unions.

But you see the thing was, by then he’d worked out that he had fallen for Molly. What had started out (or so he thought) as sex and companionship quickly became…more, and he found that the thought of having Molly for his wife made him feel something akin to contentment.

A well timed wedding gift from his sticky beaked brother arrived by Sherpa to the monastery that same day in the form of a retrospectively dated marriage certificate issued by the Borough of Westminster, making Molly Hooper the widow of Sherlock Holmes (recently deceased).

In for a penny, in for a pound had always been the late Mr Holmes’ maxim. So they’d consummated like bunnies (tea drinking bunnies, because British) and, truth be told, Sherlock was finding that he rather enjoyed this married lark.

It was on their four day wedding anniversary that Sherlock had an inkling he’d missed something.

Prophylactics not being freely available half way up the side of a mountain inhabited only by Buddhist warrior monks who had taken a vow of celibacy, it occurred to him that bonking like bunnies might – _just might_ – result in breeding like bunnies. But then Molly had whispered something in his ear about tantric sex and whatever he’d been thinking rushed out of his brain like so much south bound blood.

Which is how nine months later, trapped alone in a cabin in the woods, eighteen miles east of the arse end of nowhere, Sherlock found himself – phone in hand – at the business end of his wife’s nether regions, telling her in no uncertain terms, “Just because I put the baby in there, that doesn’t mean I know how to get it out.”

“So help me,” Molly said, flat on her back in the middle of the bed, knees splayed, panting, raising herself up onto her elbows, “if you’re Googling how to deliver a baby-”

“Actually I’m Youtubing it.”

“Put the fucking phone down, Sherlock, or so help me God I will rip your balls off with my bare hands.”

That shouldn’t have been as threatening as it was: Molly was all of two foot six, weighed exactly nothing and wore cardigans covered in kittens. She made jam, and went to Women’s Institute meetings for Christ’s sake.

But.

He’d seen her tackle Serbian assassins and make them weep for their Mummies, so he took the promise of violence quite seriously and did precisely as he was told. Hardly anybody that he knew could manually castrate a man, but Sherlock wasn’t willing to bet that his dear heart wasn’t one of them.

Thus far, Molly had been irrationally resistant to any of the excellent suggestions he’d made. _No_ , she did not want to take a walk. _No_ , she did not want to get up on her knees. _No_ , she did not want to have (a) sex, or (b) a curry. The internet, it turned out, was rubbish at suggesting how to appease full-term, labouring mothers.

Right then.

Time to do the only thing he knew would work for sure. “Maybe I should boil the kettle?”

Clearly he had a death wish because he did, in fact, put the kettle on.

Molly cut him a look that left him in no doubt whatsoever that she was seriously reconsidering her life choices. “Fuck’s sake, Sherlock, now’s not the time for tea.”

“I meant,” here he bestowed his best _why-must-I suffer-so_ eye-roll on his wife: she really could be spectacularly oblivious sometimes, “for the baby.”

“The baby doesn’t want tea either, you twat.”

Despite his best efforts, Molly was on the verge of a towering snit. He could tell. He was very perceptive that way.

Outside, there was a clap of thunder and Sherlock wasn’t entirely sure that Molly hadn’t summoned it. And he swore – _swore_ – that for the briefest of moments her eyes had glowed red. She began to growl in the back of her throat (it sounded like- like- _Zuul_ ??) and her hair, sticking up sweatily on end, looked suspiciously like horns.

“Holy fucking shit,” she screamed in the throes of another contraction, grabbing a fist full of his shirt. “I think it’s coming. You’ll have to look and tell me what you can see.”

Actually, he’d really rather not.

The last time he’d sneaked a peak – embracing the miracle of birth, _blah, blah, blah, blah, blah_ – he’d turned green and almost fainted. There was…stuff…leaking out of her body – bloody, mucousy stuff – and God only knew what else she was hiding up there (judging by the size of her there was probably a bowling ball or two – though Sherlock wisely decided to keep that thought to himself).

They’d had one lifeline: a doctor on standby, arranged by The British Government. But last they’d heard he was still half an hour away, and considering the frequency and pitch of Molly’s screaming, the baby would be here long before the cavalry arrived.

So. Time to man up.

Bathed in stoicism, he clasped a hand to each of Molly’s knees and lifted the bed sheet, paused, thought about his last attempt to look, and positioned a chair to catch him should he…wilt.

Panting through gritted teeth, Molly gentled him along with loving words of encouragement. “Come. The fuck. On. You bastard.”

“Eh, right.” He braced himself and parted her legs.

_Oh. Shit._

“I- I think I see a head,” he said, looking exactly like a stunned owl and turning white as snow, feeling a bit woozy and entirely useless, because despite reading the books and watching the videos, he had precisely zero clue about what to do next. “That means pushing, doesn’t it?”

“Uh-huh,” Molly gritted.

“That- it’s not supposed to happen like this. Aren’t you supposed to be in labour for days?”

It had been precisely three hours and forty minutes since she noticed the first contraction, but it seemed the jelly-bean was every bit as impatient and obstinate as its father and didn’t plan to wait around much longer before absconding from its mother’s womb. “It happens this way, sometimes.”

“Can’t you cross your legs, or something?”

“Crossing my legs would only have helped this situation if I’d done it nine months ago. It’s not going to prevent anything now.”

Between the vee of Molly’s thighs, the head popped out, and she let rip a blood-curdling scream.

The fabric of reality tore a bit as somewhere in the distance Molly delivered a litany of profane and imaginative insults to her husband. Sherlock found himself floating outside of his body: his child, his and Molly’s beautiful and perfect child was coming. Molly’s nails dug into his arm leaving four crescent shaped wounds in their wake, bringing him right back down to Earth. The scars they left on his skin would be the fodder for stories about the birth of their first child (first of seven, I wasn’t kidding about the bunny thing) that Sherlock would tell for years to come (leaving out the bit where he almost fainted, nobody ever needed to know about that).

Molly reached down and felt for the head. “You’ll have to turn the baby, gently Sherlock, or I might tear. Ninety degrees clockwise so that it’s facing my right leg. Ease its right shoulder out first, then the left; it should slip free. Do you think you can do that?”

 _Noooooooooo._ Was she crazy? Of course he couldn’t do that. He’d half considered that with the combined Hooper-Holmes genes they’d gifted to their progeny, that the baby would most likely be able to make its own way out and would have written a peer-reviewed paper on the experience by the time lunch rolled around. She wasn’t seriously expecting him to deliver it? _Was she?_

But then he looked down at his tiny child, struggling to come into this world, his wife trying so hard to bring it there safely.

So he took a bracing breath and cupped the baby’s head, turning it as gently as he could, easing it free. And then, Oh! the first shoulder popped out, then the second, and then his… Oh, _his son_ … came slipping into to this world and into his arms.

The world stopped turning and time stood still.

And then-

And then his son gasped and began to cry, his tiny mouth perfectly formed with heart shaped pouting lips, just like his father’s, his tiny but long fingers grasping and clutching at the air. He had Molly’s eyes, Molly’s beautiful eyes. The boy was a perfect blend of them both.

Sherlock couldn’t breathe. His heart felt like it might burst with joy, tears fell unconstrained from the corners of his stinging eyes. “Our son, Molly,” he said, “our son,” and placed the baby on Molly’s chest.

Molly ran her fingers through his already curling jet black hair. She was crying and wiping the baby’s face with the corner of the bed sheet, beaming at their son and looking more beautiful to her husband in that moment than she had ever done before.

Sherlock stood there, suddenly struck dumb with the shock of it all. It was then that he noticed-

“Molly? Why is there a bungee cord attached to the baby?”

She allowed herself to smile. “It’s okay. The doctor will take care of the bungee cord when he gets here.”

Molly’s hand grasped her husband’s and tightened until it hurt.

Sherlock didn’t mind.

Not one little bit.


End file.
